A young man waves goodbye to his friend and his life, when he is kidnapped by the CIA and transported overseas to a Black Site, where his enhanced interrogation begins. We witness the harsh realities of his situation and watch his deterioration at the hands of his brutal and unforgiving captors. And we reveal how the fabric of this environment affects everyone within it.

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A Senate committee defied President Bush on Thursday by rejecting his revised plan to interrogate and prosecute terrorism suspects and approving alternative legislation that he strongly opposed.

[08/06/2007 13:00:00] Parliamentary Assembly rapporteur Dick Marty (Switzerland, ALDE) reveals new evidence that US ”high-value detainees” were held in secret CIA prisons in Poland and Romania during the period 2002-2005 and alleges a secret agreement among NATO allies in October 2001 which provided the basic framework for this and other illegal CIA activities in Europe.

In an explanatory memorandum made public today, Mr Marty says he has cross-referenced the credible testimonies of over 30 members of intelligence services in the US and Europe with analysis of ”data strings” from the international flight planning system.

18 thoughts on “CIA torture prisons in Poland and Romania”

PARIS – The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 to interrogate terror suspects under a program authorized by the countries’ presidents, a report said Friday.

The prisons in northeastern Poland and southeast Romania were part of a “global spider’s web” of detentions and illegal transfers spun out around the world by the United States and its allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said the report by Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty.

Marty also suggested that NATO and the United States reached a secret deal in 2001 allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to run the covert prisons.

“We believe that the framework for such assistance was developed around NATO authorizations agreed on 4 October 2001, some of which are public and some which remain secret,” Marty said in the report.

He said former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski and Romania’s former leader Ion Iliescu as well as current President Traian Basescu authorized the program and should be held accountable.

“We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories,” the report said.

He also named the national security advisers, military and intelligence chiefs in both countries as having had a hand in the interrogation program set up as part of Washington’s “war on terror.”

Under an agreement reached with the United States, at least eight terror suspects were held in Poland including Abu Zubaydah, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, considered Al-Qaeda’s mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

“The CIA brokered ‘operating agreements’ with the governments of Poland and Romania to hold its high-value detainees in secret detention facilities on their respective territories,” said the report.

It said that the two countries “agreed to provide the premises in which these facilities were established, the highest degrees of physical security and secrecy and steadfast guarantees of non-interference.”

US President George W. Bush admitted to the existence of the secret prisons in September but said all remaining prisoners had been moved to the US naval facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Citing interviews conducted with some 30 former and serving intelligence agents in the United States and Europe, Marty said the secret prisons were set up by the CIA as a parallel facility to Guantanamo Bay where the FBI and the military were involved.

The release of the report came as a trial opened in Milan of 26 Americans — all but one of them CIA agents — accused in the 2003 kidnapping of Egyptian imam Osama Mustafa Hassan, known as Abu Omar, who was taken to a high-security prison outside Cairo, where he allegedly was tortured.

Other than Kwasniewski, Marty named Poland’s national security chief Marek Siwiec, defence minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski and head of military intelligence Marek Dukaczewski as implicated in the secret detention network.

Romanian national security advisor Ioan Talpes, defense minister Ioan Mircea Pascu and the head of directorate for military intelligence Sergiu Tudor Medar were singled out for responsibility.

Marty also cited information that the island territory of Diego Garcia and Thailand were also hosts of the so-called “black sites” set up by the CIA.

In a report released last year, Marty accused 14 European nations of colluding with US intelligence to apprehend terror suspects who were spirited to the secret detention facilities.

Six human rights groups on Thursday released a list of 39 missing people believed to have been held in the secret prisons. The 39 were from Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan and Spain.

The list was released by Amnesty International, Cageprisoners and Reprieve, along with US-based Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. AFP